FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT SAFE HAVEN - PAGE 3

Carroll County commissioners expect Maryland officials to act soon on a request for a $465,400 state grant to relocate the Safe Haven homeless shelter in Westminster. "We're hoping to hear something by the end of March, but that's not set in stone," Jolene Sullivan, Carroll's director of citizen services, told the commissioners yesterday. State funding would come from the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. Larry Moore, head of construction for that department, visited the proposed site last week.

My book club, which focuses on works with a Jewish theme, is reading "The Free World" by David Bezmozgis. It was one of the better novels we've read, though it conntinued a common theme of a rootless people looking for a safe haven. In 1978, when a trickle of Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union, three generations of the Krasnansky family land in Italy, a way station to their new home. Each member of the family carries a particularly poignant bit of personal baggage, which weighs on their decision to seek a new life in the United States, Israel or Canada. You'll like this if: You enjoy a well-written character study, rather loosely plotted.

Where does one start about guns and the love for an outdated Second Amendment that our forefathers if they lived today would never have written? Where does one begin about the armament industry, corporations without conscience for all they are killing in the name of profit? And what happened to the fingerprint activation device they once promised as a gun lock to save the lives of our children? What happened to our TV, theater, the games our children play, and who decided America needed a steady diet of murderous violence?

Dan Rodricks is right on with his article about doing better for at-risk kids than foster care ("Getting to Baltimore's at-risk kids," June 30). However, the only surefire remedy for abused and neglected kids is to prevent their being born to 11-13- and 15-year-old mothers. Children cannot thrive in households where they are raised by generations of children bearing children with no fathers around. The statistics about the risks children born to children inevitably face are mind-boggling.

DOUGLAS F. Gansler, the Montgomery County state's attorney, just wanted to do a good thing. Anybody out there against doing a good thing? Of course you're not. In Gansler's case, he just wanted to save the lives of newborn babies. It started with a case he prosecuted three years ago. Tanisha Montague was an 18-year-old Jamaican who had entered the country illegally. She gave birth to a baby girl in her Germantown townhouse an hour before midnight Jan. 25, 2000. While a snowstorm raged outside, Montague lay in bed with her baby.

During the session with editors of the Associated Press Stylebook at the American Copy Editors Society's national conference in St. Louis last week, someone brought up the issue of safe haven . It was a voice from the back of the room and I didn't quite gather the import, but someone later asked whether the term shouldn't be avoided because it is redundant. Indeed. It is an obnoxious pleonasm, a haven being by definition a safe place. But the stylebook editors on the panel, David Minthorn and Darrell Christian, declined to condemn it, because, they said, it has become a stock phrase.

CAN WE build on recent drops in violent crime to construct a safer society for the 21st century?The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, named for the brother of the late president, has a suggestion on how to do it.Across the nation's poorest neighborhoods, the Washington-based foundation would open several thousand "safe havens" for neighborhood youth, combined with police ministations on the model of the Japanese "kobans."Kobans are neighborhood-based police booths manned by officers on long-term assignment.

DESPITE the deaths in the World Trade Center bombing and the blood of the wounded, neither the American press, public nor government has yet focused on the basic nature of terrorism in and from the Middle East.The full story of how the bombing was inspired, organized and paid for may not be told in court for years, if ever. We still do not know the truth about the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103.But we do not need the courts, just the record of recent history, to understand that Mideastern terrorism is not born in some storage locker in New Jersey or the furies of a few traveling fanatics.

Four years ago, the burned-out rowhouse - barely standing, with its beams destroyed and its walls charred - was a constant reminder of one of Baltimore's most brutal crimes and a symbol of how the drug trade terrorizes city neighborhoods. City and state leaders who were gathered on the corner of Eden and Preston streets said yesterday that they hope the renovated Dawson home - soon to have new life as a community center and "safe haven" for children - will symbolize new hope for the Oliver neighborhood.

Many of us can remember what it feels like to be bullied as a kid in school or in the neighborhood. Perhaps you were the focus of a joke or a kick in the shin, or maybe it was the simple act of exclusion from the lunch table or the dodge ball team. Sometimes no harm was meant; other times the inflicted pain was intentional, and you remember it years later. One thing was certain, however, and that was the ability to escape the bullying in the safe haven of home. No schoolyard antagonist could penetrate the walls of home, and thus that sanctity served as an oasis where a bullied child could regroup and feel safe for a portion of each day while learning to navigate the world.